
P s 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

TS -O^ — 

Chap.. Copyright No. 

Shelf.i...A3. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 




HE^KY WADSWOBTH LONGFELLOW. 

(Bom 1807 — Died 1882.) 



american literature 
Papers 



BY 

ELIZABETH ABBOTT 

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Author of " Roman Literature Papers," Etc 



[may set 896) 



3/9^3/^^ 



BOSTON 
LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY 



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Copyright, 1896, 

BY 

LoTHROP Publishing Company. 

All rights reserved 



S. J. PARKHILL &. CO., PRINTERS 

226 FRANKLIN STREET 

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CONTENTS. 



CHAP. 

I. Solomon's Visit to the Capitol, 

TI. The Reyolltioxary Writings. 

III. Washington Irying. 

TV. Hawthorne and Emerson. 

y. The ''Children's Poet." 

VI. Interesting Historians. 

VII. Poetry and Song. 

VIII. Essayist, Poet and Noyelist. 

IX. A WiDELY-LOYED POET. 

X. Friends of the Young People. 

XI. Writers of Poetry. 

XII. Modern Novelists. 



SOLOMON S VISIT TO TIIP: CAPITOL. 

THERE must be miles of them ! " said 
Solomon — not Solomon the king, but 
Solomon Smith. He was visiting the United 
States Capitol at Washington, and stood in 
the entrance of the Library of Congress gazing 
about at the heaps and tables and shelves and 
corridors of books, books, books ; and at court- 
eous Mr. Spofford, the librarian, seated at his 
desk and looking as though he needed a Noah's 
Ark to save him from the flood of papers and 
volumes that crowded him nearly out of his 
own office. 

Solomon was quite right. If we should take 
all the books of the Government Libraries at 
Washington and stretch them, end to end, 
along one of the smooth Kansas prairies, how 
long a walk would it be from one end of the 



SOLOMON'S VISIT TO THE CAPITOL. 

line to the other? It is a hard question to 
answer, but we may be sure that we should 
have to travel a great many more than a hun- 
dred miles. The Capitol made Solomon feel 
very proud of his country (prouder than he had 
ever been except in firecracker times on the 
Fourth of July) ; and he was quite right again, 
in thinkino; that all these American books were 
a grand sight, as they poured in upon the clerks 
of the Library until they found scarcely room 
to set their feet. 

Not all American books, to be sure, for the 
Library of Congress has a fine collection of 
the best books of all countries, but more 
American books than most of us have ever 
seen brought together in one place. One way 
in which the Library grows is by receiving 
copies of all the books which are copyrighted 
in this country, since the law requires that they 
must be sent there. When we think of the 
number of volumes which have been obtained 
in this way since the days when American writ- 
ings began, we cannot doubt that the story of 
the growth of all this literature would be an 
interesting one. 



SOLOMON'S VISIT TO THE CAPITOL. 

When shall we say, then, that the literature 
beo'an to orow? We all know that the world 
first heard of America through Christopher 
Columbus, but when he landed here he found 
no public libraries or bookstores among the 
business places of San Salvador, nor were the 
Indians reading school books or story books as 
they sat under the palm-trees or on the beach. 
In the old days stories and history were handed 
down not by books, but by the memories of the 
old men and w^omen of the tribes, except such 
few records as were made, often in picture 
form, on the woven work or wood work of the 
Indians. Some of the tribe histories were kept 
in this way, and are interesting to those who 
have learned to understand them. Different 
kinds of lines and marks showed when wars or 
deaths had occurred, and odd pictures described 
special events of importance. In the records 
of one old tribe there is a rough sketch of a 
man with explosive-looking lines coming from 
his mouth. This was the year when a great 
epidemic of whooping-cough occurred among 
the Indians, and was the best picture they 
could think of to represent the terrible cough. 



SOLOMON'S VISIT TO THE CAPITOL. 

But of course we do not call all this liter- 
ature. American literature began with the 
writings produced by the English settlers who 
came over long after Columbus had discovered 
the country ; those whom we think of most as 
having settled on the coasts of New England 
and Virginia. And it will not be hard for us 
to see why there were not many books made in 
this country in those days. In the first place 
there were for a good while no printing-presses 
here ; and in the second place the settlers were 
too busy to write. Some were fighting the 
Indians or making friends with them ; others 
were building up the struggling towns or culti- 
vating the fields in order to find food for their 
children, and the life was a hard one for years 
and years after the colonies had begun to be 
established. 

One other thing for the same reason we will 
be quick to understand ; that is that the writing 
which was done in those early days was of the 
kind which we should call travel or history. 
Those who had gone thousands of miles away 
from home to live in a wild new land wrote 
about what they saw there, and about the hap- 




CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH. 

(Born 1579 — Died 1632.) 



SOLOMON'S VISIT TO THE CAPITOL, 

penings in their villages. So we have "A true 
relation of such occurrences and accidents of 
note as hath happened in Virginia since the first 
planting of that colony/' a book by the famous 
Captain John Smith, which was printed in Lon- 
don in 1608. It is in this volume that the old 
story of Pocahontas is told, and in this as well 
as many other incidents we are afraid that 
Captain Smith was acting a little more as a 
story-teller than a historian. We have, too, a 
''Journey to the Land of Eden," written by 
Colonel Byrd, a famous Virginia gentleman, in 
which ''Eden" refers to what is now the State 
of North Carolina. 

The New Englanders w^ere far ahead of the 
Virginians in beginning to print their own 
books, and a press was set up at Cambridge in 
1639 and an Almanac issued from it. The 
next year came the first English book printed 
on the continent, the old "Bay Psalm Book," 
a collection of the Psalms in rhyme, made by 
various New England clergymen. One of these 
clergymen was John Eliot, who twenty years 
later translated the entire Bible into the Al2:on- 
quin language, the tongue of the Indians to 



SOLOMON'S VISIT TO THE CAPITOL. 

whom he had gone as a missionary. " Mamusse 
Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Bibhim God naneeswe 
Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku Testa- 
ment'' was the name of the book. Copies of 
it are still preserved, but it is said that there 
is no longer any one living who can read it. 
John Eliot will always be remembered, not 
only as one who did a great literary work, but 
as one of the very few Americans who have 
ever troubled themselves very greatly to help 
our native Indians. 

One interesting author who lived in Massa- 
chusetts about two hundred ^^ears ago was old 
Cotton Mather, a Puritan minister who wrote 
histories and religious books which have always 
since been connected in people's minds with 
those ''Colonial da^^s," as we call them. His 
writings would prove ver^^ dry and hard reading 
nowadays, but after all he was a jolly old fel- 
low, and one can almost imagine him waddling 
down the streets of Boston, in his high collar 
and knee breeches, laughing to himself at some 
ponderous joke which had entered his mind. 
Once on a time, as he was walking in this way, 
when quite old and deaf, some wicked little 



SOLOMON'S VISIT TO THE CAPITOL. 

Boston street boys, seeing him near, were 
seized with the idea of doing a terrible thing. 
It is sometime"s hard to imagine what mischief 
small boys of two hundred years ago would 
have enjoyed. These planned to run up behind 
the old minister, and shout into his ear as 
loudly as they could yell: ''You're an old fool. 
Cotton ! " 

It was a fearful thing to do, and they 
started to run away from the dreadful con- 
sequences ; but the old man turned around 
quietly, and leaned on his cane while he replied : 
'' I know it, I know it. The Lord help thee 
and me to be wiser ! " 

In old musty libraries we find many well- 
worn books written in those early days, num- 
bers of them by men whom now very few know 
anything about. Some of the early New Eng- 
land governors kept interesting diaries of the 
daily events of their lives, as many people do 
to-day ; some of the ministers published ver}^ 
long sermons, which were good things to go to 
sleep under then, and are still more dull to read 
now. All these volumes it makes one feel old 
to handle and look into, especially if one thinks 



SOLOMON'S VISIT TO THE CAPITOL. 

of the people in powdered wigs and knee 
breeches and three-cornered hats who walked 
over the same ground where we walk, in the 
days when this part of the world was young 
and little known, and only a few people who 
could read or write lived on a narrow strip of 
land between the forest and the sea. 

We can see how, just as nowadays little 
waiting or reading is done in a new and grow- 
ing town on the AVestern prairies, where all 
the strength of the people is needed to build 
up their home, in the seventeenth and the 
eighteenth centuries few Americans made books 
of importance. 

It is this same rapid growth that has al- 
ways kept America a little behind her Mother 
England in what we call literature ; but when 
she became independent and strong, men were 
soon found whose pens won the admiration of 
the world. 



II. 



THE REVOLUTIONARY WRITINGS. 

I HAVE already told you, in the previous 
chapter, what a great number of books have 
been produced in our country, considering the 
short time since it was founded. We considered 
that few of these, however, were written in the 
very early days of its life, because the people 
were at that time so much engaged in settling 
and building up the new nation ; and we looked 
hastily at two or three of the old-time writers. 
This, we said, brought us down to the times of 
the Revolution. 

But if we understand how the early efforts at 
colonization must have prevented work of this 
kind, how much more plainly did the struggles 
of the War of the Revolution, and the begin- 
nings of the new Government ! Although the 
numbers and strength of the people had grown 



THE REVOLUTIONARY WRITINGS. 

more than they had thought possible, still they 
were few and weak, and a war with a great 
country like England was quite enough to 
occupy them, without giving them time to write 
stories or poems. But a certain kind of liter- 
ature grew up about Kevolutionary times, just 
as a certain kind had grown up about colonial 
times. 

This was what is called ''political '* literature, 
and had to do altogether with the thoughts of 
men about the great questions which concerned 
our Government — whether we should be able 
to live if we were separated from England, and 
if so what kind of a nation we could set up. 

So the Revolutionary writings are full of 
this sort of matter. There are the published 
speeches of the great orators of the time, such 
as Patrick Henry, whose speech ending ''Give 
me liberty or give me death ! " a good many of 
us have recited sometime at school. There 
were essays written by the great men of the 
time, which had as much weight as would 
articles written for the newspapers of this 
generation by Mr. Harrison, Mr. Cleveland 
or Mr. Blaine ; more, indeed, for we do not 



THE REVOLUTIONARY WRITINGS. 

think so much of our greatest men now as they 
used to. Among the most important of these 
essays were a number of papers called the 
^' Federalist," published after the war was over 
and the now free people were quarreling over 
the new Government. Another very interesting 
class of writers were what are called the "Revo- 
lutionary satirists," those who helped either the 
English or the colonists by writing comic rhymes 
in which they made great sport of their oppo- 
nents. We would laugh in these days to think 
of mere rhymes taking any important part in 
politics, but then they were more widely read 
and more serious in their effects ; now we see 
very little of such writing, except an occasional 
attempt at it in the newspapers during a pres- 
idential campaign. But we all know at least 
the tune of one of these old satires — ''Yankee 
Doodle." 

We all know, too, the one greatest piece of 
literature of those times. It was written by 
Thomas Jefferson, and begins ''When in the 
course of human events." It was not written 
to be fine sounding, but to serve a great purpose, 
and a good many men lost their lives because 



THE REVOLUTIONARY WRITINGS, 

they not only read it but believed it. We still 
like to hear it read on the Fourth of July, when 
we have become a little tired of listening to our 
firecrackers and torpedoes ; while the manuscript 
copy hangs in a great case in the Department of 
State at Washington. 

Anything which scholars now take to be true 
poetry was unknown among our writings until 
forty years after the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence ; but there was one great book (great in 
size, we mean) published in the time of which 
we are writing which is worth being remembered 
because men say it is the "only epic written in 
America." Now it is a little hard to tell what a 
man means when he speaks of an ''epic," which 
is an old Greek word, and has suffered considera- 
ble abuse in its day ; but in general he means 
a long poem connected more or less with history, 
or what pretends to be history, and having some 
great man for its hero. Now a tolerably good 
writer, who lived in both the eighteenth and 
nineteenth centuries, Joel Barlow by name, said 
to himself: ''Greece had a great epic poem 
about Achilles, Italy about ^neas, and if our 
new country is going to be as big as Greece 



l^IJE REVOLUTIONARY WRITINGS. 

and Rome, she must have an epic too." Who 
but Columbus should be honored m this way? 
So the ''Columbiad'' was written, named in the 
same way that Virgil's ''^neid" had been. 
Most people have forgotten all about it by this 
time ; and America seems so far to have gotten 
along nicely without a great epic of its own. 
We have been taking interest in different kinds 
of poetry ; but it is worth noticing that a poem 
called '' The Epic of Saul," written recently by 
Dr. W. C. Wilkinson, has taken its place as 
our second epic — to be remembered perhaps 
as long as the first one. 

So much for a general glance at the writings 
of what we call the Revolutionary Period. We 
must now stop to look at a writer who belonged 
quite as much to colonial times as to these, 
dear old Benjamin Franklin, of Pennsylvania. 
We have all seen the picture of him as he per- 
formed his famous experiment with his kite, to 
find what the lightning was made of. His face 
is on many of our Government "greenbacks" 
in the Capitol at Washington, and again and 
again in places where our country has delighted 
to honor him. If we had space we could give 



THE REVOLUTIONARY WRITINGS. 

not only an entire paper, but a whole series of 
them, to him alone. 

Franklin spent a great part of his life in 
helping along the people and Government of 
his adopted countr}^, and it is not as a writer 
that we know or. think the most of him. He 
started the Philadelphia fire department and 
the public library, the University of Pennsyl- 
vania, the first American magazine — called 
''The General Magazine and Historical Chroni- 
cle " — he signed the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence and the new Constitution ; he went to 
both England and France as ambassador from 
our country, and he earned the respect and love 
of almost all who saw him. A great French- 
man wrote an epigram about him (by epigram 
we mean a big idea in a little dress), which 
reads, w^hen it is translated: ''He snatched the 
lightning from Heaven and the scepter from 
tyrants." In this he referred, of course, to 
his experiments with electrical science, and his 
love of liberty. 

We do not hear so much of his literary work, 
because it was not so important or so worthy 
to be remembered ; but there is much of it 




BENJAMIN FPvANKLIN, 

(Born 1706 — Died 1790.) 



THE REVOLUTIONARY WRITINGS. 

which we should enjoy reading over nowadays. 
His most interesting writings were in ' ' Poor 
Richard's Almanac," a kind of annual almanac 
which he issued for nearly twenty-five years. 
It had all sorts of wise sayings and quaint 
proverbs in it, many of which have come down 
to us and to our daily use. '' Little strokes 
fell great oaks ; " ''Early to bed and early to 
rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise ; " 
''Never leave that till to-morrow which you can 
do to-day," are some of these. The Almanac 
contained too, "Rules of Health," "Plan for 
Saving One Hundred Thousand Pounds," "The 
Way to Make Money Plenty in Every Man's 
Pocket" — bits of advice for young men worthy 
of a good deal of practice in 1732 and in 1892 
alike. 

Benjamin Franklin wrote, also, his own 
biography, in a most charming and interesting 
style, and a good many stories from this are 
familiar to those of us w^ho may know nothing 
of the book, such as that of the "man who had 
an axe to grind." 

In all stories of his life we shall find many 
bright little anecdotes which will help us to 



THE REVOLUTIONARY WRITINGS. 

understand how wise and how kind this great 
man was. 

It is no more easy to tell when one literary 
period begins and another ends than it is to tell 
when a little fellow, who can say a good many 
big words and do a good many wonderful 
things, outdoors and in, stops being a baby 
and becomes a Boy with a capital B ; but we 
have to stop somewhere, and so our next chap- 
ter takes up the literature of the New Nation, 
and the first man who ever came to be known 
over the world as an American who had written 
books which were well worth reading. 



Ill, 



WASHINGTON IRVING. 



WE have already spoken of the literature 
which grew up about the Revolutionary 
War, of the Declaration of Independence, of 
one or two poems of small value, and especially 
of the writings of Benjamin Franklin. We 
promised ourselves that this time we should hear 
of the first man who came to be known as an 
American who had written books of real worth. 
This man was Washington Irving. He is 
not read very widely at the present time, but 
yet he is the first American writer whom we 
read for pleasure, and not from any curiosity 
to see what books w^ere written in those days. 
What makes us think even more of him is that 
he was the first American writer w^hose work 
was thought highly of in England. Up to his 
time our English cousins lauohed at the idea of 



WASHINGTON IRVING, 

any really fine literature coming from this side 
the ocean ; since his success they have known 
us better. 

It is a question, indeed, whether the earliest 
writings accomplished in our own country are 
to be called English or American ; for, although 
they were written here, their authors were so 
lately from the mother country that their work 
was in no way different from what it would have 
been in their old home. By this we mean that 
it was no different in its language or style, 
though the subjects would be affected by the 
strange things in this land. 

So Irving was, in a good many respects, an 
English writer. He traveled and even lived in 
Great Britain for a number of years ; and he 
loved the old English customs, such as their 
Christmas celebrations and their country life. 
He loved the oldness everywhere which he 
missed in his native land — the gray stone 
churches with the ivy growing over them, and 
the houses with memories of hundreds of years 
about them. He was rested by such things, as 
one is rested nowadays in going from a new 
villao:e where the houses and fences are of the 




WASHINGTON TRACING. 

(Born 1783 — Died 1859.) 



WASHINGTON IRVING. 

latest style, and the grass and trees set out and 
made to order, to some old town where the 
trees are old and dignified, and the houses have 
settled down to a quiet life years ago. 

Irving's writings fill a wide space when set 
all together on the bookshelves. Among them 
are some large historical works, with biographies 
of Columbus, George Washington, Mohammed 
and Oliver Goldsmith. A very interesting group 
is made up of his writings about old Spain, 
where he spent some time. But perhaps the 
best is the famous ''Sketch-Book." Let us 
read what he says at the beginning of it : 



^'Iwas always fond of visiting new scenes, and observing 
strange characters and manners. Even when a mere child I 
began my travels, and made many tours of discovery into 
foreign parts and unknown regions of my native city, to the 
frequent alarm of my parents, and the emolument of the town 
crier. As I grew into boyhood I extended the range of my 
observations. My holiday afternoons were spent in rambles 
about the surrounding country. I made myself familiar with 
all its places famous in history or fable. I knew every spot 
where a murder or robbery had been committed, or a ghost 
seen. I visited the neighboring villages, and added greatly 
to my stock of knowledge by noting their habits and customs, 
and conversing with their sages and great men. I even jour- 
neyed one long summer's day to the summit of the most dis- 
tant hill, whence I stretched my eye over many a mile of 
unknown country, and was astonished to find how vast a globe 
I inhabited." 



WASHINGTON IRVING, 

He then goes on to say that as he grew older 
he was able to explore not only the country 
about his home, but lands across the sea ; and 
that as artists bring home sketch-books filled 
with pictures of what they have seen, so his 
'' Sketch-Book" was a little collection of inter- 
esting things which he had met with in his 
travels. 

There are man}^ pretty sketches in it, show- 
ing that he never forgot his boyish habit of 
kee-ping his eyes and ears open to some purpose 
in his wanderings. And there is one which we 
must refer to because we all know it already. 
Nothing else than the story of sleepy old Rip 
Van Winkle, to be sure. Irving pretended 
that it was written by an old Dutchman called 
Diedrich Knickerbocker, and he adds this note 
at the end : 

''The Kaatsberg or Catskill Mountains have always been a 
region full of fable. The Indians considered them the abode 
of spirits who influenced the weather, spreading sunshine or 
clouds over the landscape, and sending good or bad hunting 
seasons. They were ruled by an old squaw spirit, said to be 
their mother. She dwelt on the highest peak of the Catskills, 
and had charge of the doors jdi day and night to open and shut 
them at the proper hour. She hung up the new moons in the 
skies, and cut up the old ones into stars. In times of drought, 
if properly prnpitinted. she would spin light summer clouds 



WASHING TON IR VING, 

out of cobwebs and morning dew, and send them off from the 
crest of the mountain, flake after flake, like flakes of carded 
cotton, to float in the air, until, dissolved by the heat of the 
sun, they would fall in gentle showers, causing the grass to 
spring, the fruits to ripen, and the corn to grow an inch an 
hour. If displeased, however, she would brew up clouds black 
as ink, sitting in the midst of them like a bottle-bellied spider 
in the midst of its web; and when these clouds broke, woe 
betide the vallevs! " 



It was living's greatest charm that, sitting 
in his beautiful '' Sunny side " on the Hudson, 
he gathered the old Dutch legends about the 
river and its surroundings, and wove them into 
literature for all to read. Such literature we 
call ''local," because of its connection with 
particular places ; and since the early part of 
the century a great deal of it has been pro- 
duced, having to do with all the various parts 
of our great country. Those of us who read 
much in the magazine stories of to-day will 
notice that for a few years past there has been 
a very tiresome custom of publishing great 
numbers of stories whose scenes are in the 
Southern States. There is always likely to be 
some tendency of this kind ; and it was Irving 
who made famous the beautiful Hudson country 
of New York State. 



WASHINGTON IRVING. 

It was in the first years of the century that 
his work became well-known ; and in those 
days people had more time for writing and 
reading than we have nowadays, just as they 
had longer journeys to take, and preached 
longer sermons. They used longer words and 
sentences, and to-day they seem a little tire- 
some to us, because we are always in a hurry, 
and demand that when any one has a story to 
tell he shall tell it as quickly as possible, if he 
wants any one to read it. 

This is the case with Washington Irving ; for, 
although his language was remarkably fine, and 
his thoughts entertaining, if he could come to 
life again as an unknown writer his sketches 
and stories would come back from the news- 
papers with the word "unavailable" on them; 
and if any editor paused to tell him what was 
the matter, he would say, ''You are too slow, 
and use too big words for an American of 
1893." Just like him in this respect, only 
a great many times worse in his style, was a 
good story-teller who lived at the same time 
with Irving — James Fenimore Cooper. He 
was one of the first to write stories of sailor 



WASHINGTON IRVING. 

life and Indian life, and though there are many 
stupid things about his books, they hare always 
been read with some interest for the exciting 
tales which they contain. It is said that they 
were published in thirty-four different places in 
Europe as soon as he produced them, and were 
scattered all over the world. Many of us may 
already have read ''The Spy," '' Leatherstock- 
ing Tales," ''The Pilot," "Red Rover" or 
"The Last of the Mohicans." The stories are 
sometimes good to read when one curls up in 
the corner of the sofa on a rainy day ; but ours 
of to-day are more brisk and strong, and the 
best of them much worthier of reading. 



IV. 



HAWTHORNE AND EMERSON. 

WE have talked of Washington Irving, 
and how he was the first American to 
be recognized as a great writer. We saw what 
is meant by ''local" literature, and how the 
story-tellers of the early part of this century 
wrote in a different style from those of to-day. 
Among these we spoke of James Fenimore 
Cooper. 

So far we have tried to talk about our litera- 
ture in the order in which it was written, be- 
ginning with the very earliest writings of 
America; but now it will be hard for us to 
follow this plan. We might say that Fenimore 
Cooper's books were most popular at about the 
year 1840 ; at the same time other prominent 
writers were interesting the people, and from 
that day to this these overlap one another in 



HAWTHORNE AND EMERSON. 

the order of time, so that it would be ahuost 
as hard to arrange them and mark them "first,'' 
'^ second" and ''third," as it would to do the 
same thing Avith the threads of a carpet. 

The beautiful town of Concord, Mass., has 
been the home of many famous literary people, 
and it was there that Mr. Ralph Waldo Emer- 
son, who was born in 1803, and who is thought 
to be our greatest American philosopher, lived 
and wrote. Now philosophers are very wise 
men, who know a great deal about certain 
things, and very little about certain other 
things, and whom it is almost always extremely 
hard to understand. So we shall find that Mr. 
Emerson's ''Essays," which are the chief part 
of his writings, will not be interesting until we 
begin to know and think a good deal ; and 
many people who are old enough to be wise are 
just as little able to discover what Mr. Emerson 
and the other Transcendentalists mean, as when 
they were little children. Transcendentalists is 
the big word given to the particular group of 
philosophers to which Mr. Emerson belonged. 

But although his writings were chiefly of the 
character of essays, he also wrote not a little 



HAWTHORNE AND EMERSON 

beautiful poetry, so that by some people be is 
thought to be one of the very best of our poets. 
His hymn which was sung at the dedication of 
the soldiers' monument at Concord, in which he 
tells of the ' ' embattled farmers " who ' '- fired the 
shot heard round the world," is one of his best. 
And here is a verse about the ^'bumblebee" 
that will interest us : 

** Aught unsavory or unclean 
Hath my insect never seen ; 
But violets and bilberry bells, 
Maple-sap and daffodils, 
Grass with green flag half-mast high, 
Succory to match the sky, 
Columbine with horn of honey. 
Scented fern and agrimony, 
Clover, catchfly, adder's-tongue. 
And brier roses dwelt among." 

How many of these plants and flowers are 
those of us who are Yankees familiar with? 

We must not leave Emerson without glanc- 
ing at his little ''Fable," which shows how a 
philosopher can sometimes put a big thought in 
very simple words : 

*' The mountain and the squirrel 

Had a quarrel, 

And the former called the latter 'Mittle prig." 

Bun replied, 




NATHANIEL HAWTTIOKNE. 
(Born 1804— Diecll864.) 



HAWTHORNE AND EMERSON 

** You are doubtless very big, 
But all sorts of things and weather 
Must be taken in together 
To make up a year, 
And a sphere. 
And I think it no disgrace 
To occupy my place. 
• If I'm not so large as you. 
You are not so small as I, 
And not half so spry. 
I'll not deny you make 
A very pretty squirrel track ; 
Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; 
If I cannot carry forests on my back, 
Neither can you crack a nut." 

But the great Coucord story-teller whom old 
and young still love was Nathaniel Hawthorne, 
born just a year after Emerson. '' Wayside " 
was his home at Concord, and our readers will 
be interested to know that this has been for 
some time the home of the family of the well- 
known American publisher, the late Mr. Daniel 
Lothrop. 

Hawthorne was for some time a Government 
officer at the Custom House in the old city of 
Salem, and in the first part of ''The Scarlet 
Letter" he describes his surroundings while 
there with such truthfulness, that when the 
book was published many Salem people could 
pick out the people of whom he spoke. This 



HAWTHORNE AND EMERSON 

book, '' The House of the Seven Gables," ''The 
Marble Faun'^ and ''Twice Told Tales" are, 
perhaps, his best-known writings. His stories, 
while they were not about ghosts or fairies, had 
something airylike and ghostlike about very 
many of them, so that they do not give us the 
feeling that the things in them really happened ; 
but they are perhaps all the more interesting 
for that. He was far enough back in the cent- 
ury to have about him a touch of that same 
"wordiness" that w^e spoke of in our last 
paper. But there is no need of saying that 
we must read Hawthorne, for we are all glad 
enough to do it. Two of his books, the 
"Wonder Book" and " Tanglewood Tales," 
were written especially for young folks, and 
very many of his stories, like that of the 
"Great Stone Face" in the mountain, are 
equally interesting. 

Hawthorne was a handsome man, and, what 
was better, a good and lovable one. His son 
Julian, who is also an author, has written a 
charming story of the life of both father and 
mother, which is very entertaining reading. In 
Concord and Salem there are still many re- 



HAWTHORNE AND EMERSON 

minders of the one who helped to make them 
famous. Some one says : ''If you go out for 
a stroll about Salem, you will inquire for the 
town pump" (which Hawthorne wrote of), 
'' and for the House of the Seven Gables, where 
poor old Hepsibah set out the little store of 
toys in the shop window, and where Phoebe 
flitted about like a butterfly. ... As for 
the Custom House, there it is, real and tangi- 
ble, with the old decaying wharf stretching 
down in front. Somebody will show you where 
Hawthorne purported to discover the manuscript 
of the ' Scarlet Letter,' and if you ask, you will 
be told where you must go to see the old desk 
at which he wrote." 



THE "children's POET." 



THE town of Cambridge is especially fa- 
mous as the home of Harvard College. 

Here lived for many years the poet whom all 
Americans, or at least all American children, 
best love. He was glad to be known as the 
"children's poet" the world over. 

Because we know so much of Longfellow al- 
ready, we shall need to learn the less about 
him. He was born in Maine, in 1807, and 
graduated from college in the same class with 
Mr. Hawthorne ; he became known to the pub- 
lic by his writings perhaps a little earlier tha.n 
his classmate. For a long time Mr. Longfellow 
taught in Harvard College, winning the love 
and admiration of all his students. He wrote 
some books in prose, especially during his early 
life ; but of course it is as a poet that we think 



THE ''CHILDREN'S POETr 

of him first of all. We shall find that people are 
by no means agreed in calling him our greatest 
poet (America is not yet old enough to know 
who of her children are greatest) , but every one 
knows that he is the best loved. Poetry is apt 
to be hard reading. Poets take liberties which 
we grant to nobody else, and say things which 
it seems as though they can scarcely understand 
themselves ; but there was nothing about this in 
Mr. Longfellow. His poems are like the best 
poetry in their musicalness, and like the best 
prose in their clearness. 

All his life long he wrote, improving a little, 
perhaps, all the time. His greatest works are 
''Hiawatha," ''The Courtship of Miles Stand- 
ish,'' "Evangeline," "The Golden Legend," 
and a translation of the great Italian poem of 
Dante. "Hiawatha" is an odd story of the 
American Indians, and is written in a style and 
a meter quite unlike any other English poem. 
"Miles Standish" and "Evangeline" are both 
American stories ; the one of colonial days in 
New England, the other of the Acadian peas- 
ants of Nova Scotia. The meter of these two 
works is also interesting, as they served to give 



THE ''CHILDREN'S POET:' 

it a genuine place in our language. It is called 
the ''hexameter," or "six-measure," and is 
the great measure of the old Greek and Roman 
poems ; but it was reserved for Longfellow to 
show how beautiful it could be made in Eng- 
lish. It is never used with rhyme. AVe can 
easily get an idea of it by repeating the lines : 

*'As ships that pass in the nii,^ht, and speak each other in 

passing, 
Only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; 
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, 
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence." 

/ 

These lines give us an idea, too, of more 
than Longfellow's meter ; they show his way 
of thinking. He could not see the river rushing 
by under the bridge, or the shadow^s on the path 
in the moonlight, or any of the beautiful things 
of nature, without comparing them with higher 
things. His purpose was always to help ; and 
when he told the beautiful old legends of which 
he was so fond, we shall always find an ending 
which, although it is not labeled ''Moral, "tells 
us what Mr. Longfellow thought was the lesson 
of the story. One of the best of such poems 
is ' ' Sandalphon : " 



THE *' CHILDREN'S POET:' 

' How, erect, at the outermost gates 
Of the City Celestial, he waits, 

With his feet on the ladder of light, 
That, crowded with angels unnumbered, 
By Jacob was seen, as he slumbered 
Alone in the desert at night, 

'* Serene in the rapturous throng, 
Unmoved by the rush of the song, 

With ej'es unimpassioned and slow, 
Among the dead angels, the deathless 
Sandalphon stands listening breathless 

To the sounds that ascend from below. 

"And he gathers the prayers as he stands, 
And they change into flowers in his hands. 

Into garlands of purple and red; 
And beneath the great arch of the portal. 
Through the streets of the City Immortal, 

Is wafted the fragrance they shed." 



No better selection than this could be made 
to illustrate the musicalness which we spoke of 
as one of Longfellow's great characteristics. 

But the best thing which we can tell about 
this great man (or any other great man) is that 
he was thoroughly good. It was for this that 
his own children and all other children loved 
him, and that every one mourned for the sad 
losses which he had. Most of us know his 
poem ''The Children's Hour," in which he 
writes of his own home life with his little ones. 



THE ''CHILDREN'S POET:' 

It was after the death of one of these that the 
beautiful ''Resignation" appeared, beginning: 

" There is no flock ^ however watched and tended, 

But one dead lamb is there. 
There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended, 

But has one vacant chair." 

At his fine old house in Cambridge, Mr. 
Longfellow was always at home to every one, 
young and old. He would receive all visitors 
himself, and show them ''the old clock on the 
stair," and the other interesting things in the 
house. He never refused his autograph to any 
request (and this is a virtue which no cele- 
brated person, short of a saint, is ever credited 
with) ; he paused continually in his work to 
write helpful letters to friends and strangers 
who had asked advice or assistance ; and so 
far was he from wishing to hide from the 
crowds who longed to see him, that he would 
sit in his study in the evening, with the room 
lighted and the curtains drawn. Some one has 
said that it may be truly said of him, as it was 
of the Saviour, that ' ' he went about doing 
good. " It is recorded that when he was spoken 
of as a member of the Board of Visitors of 




CORNER IX LONGFELLOW* S STUDY, 

{In the Poet^s nomCj Cambridge,) 



THE ''CHILDREN'S POET:' 

Harvard College, the president said: ''What 
would be the use? Longfellow could never be 
brought to find fault with anybody or anything." 
In his appearance he w^as very attractive, so 
that Charles Kingsley, the great English writer, 
said that Longfellow's face was the most beau- 
tiful human face that he had ever seen. We 
have already spoken of the love which the peo- 
ple of England had for him, and still feel. 
When he died, in 1882, not only all America 
mourned, but his friends across the sea ; and 
in Westminster Abbey, which we have so often 
spoken of as the last resting-place of the great 
English authors, he was not left without a me- 
morial. It is a beautiful thing to know that the 
last line of poetry which he wrote was : 

" It is daybreak everywhere! " 

Perhaps this is a good place in which to 
speak of the character of poets. They are 
generally supposed to be somewhat differently 
made from other people, and their work leads 
them to such high thoughts and feelings that 
when we admire their writings we are generally 
right in admiring the men themselves. Yet it 



THE " CHILDREN'S POET.'' 

is a very common thing for a man's poetry to 
be any nnmber of times better than himself; 
and writers have certain faults peculiarly their 
own, like any other class of people. Some- 
times they think they are too big to have much 
to do with other people ; sometimes they think 
that nothing amounts to much which does not 
agree with their own work ; sometimes, saddest 
of all, their poetry is one thing, and their lives 
quite another. 

Therefore America can well be proud of 
having as her most popular poet a man who 
was no whit below his best thoughts. When 
Mr. Longfellow wrote of love, he was loving ; 
when he taught of trust, he trusted God him- 
self ; and his life is a precious memory to all 
who knew him. When people tell us that, 
though he may be popular, his work is all too 
simple, and will die for lack of depth, let us 
reply, the children know better than that ; for 
one who is truly a '' children's poet " never dies. 



Vl. 



INTERESTING HISTORIANS. 

BEFORE we go on with the more interesting 
writers we must look for a little at some 
books which are perhaps not such pleasant read- 
ing as our favorite — poetry. 

These are our histories. Those which we use 
in school make rather dull work for us often- 
times, because they put so many things in so 
small a space, and have so many hard dates in 
them. But all histories are not stupid, as we 
have probably already found out. When the 
volumes of Lord Macaulay's ''History of Eng- 
land" were published, every one bought them 
and read them as eagerly as we do magazine 
stories nowadays. 

It is true that in America we have had no 
one like Macaulay; yet there has been one 
American whose histories read like fairy stories. 



INTERESTING HISTORIANS. 

This man was Mr. Motley — John Lothrop 
Motley — who died about sixteen years ago, 
and who wrote the great Dutch histories, the 
''Rise of the Dutch Republic," and the "His- 
tory of the United Netherlands." Those of us 
who know anything at all of the story of the 
queer old country, with its dykes and windmills 
and canals, can understand how interesting 
these books might be ; and in writing them 
Mr. Motley gained the name of being our 
greatest historian, though another man has 
been perhaps more prominent than he, since 
this one wrote of his own country. We mean 
Mr. Bancroft, who is probably the only man in 
no way connected with the Government whom 
our national Congress has given a resolution 
of thanks. 

Such people are admitted to the floor of Con- 
gress, and old Mr. Bancroft used to be seen 
there at inauguration ceremonies, and on other 
great occasions. 

The thanks were rendered for the great 
"History of the United States," the last vol- 
ume of which was issued just fifty years after 
the first one. It makes one positively tired to 




FRANCIS PARKMAN. 

(Born 1823 — Died 1893.) 



INTERESTING HISTORIANS, 

think of a book which took half a century to 
be written ! As a story, this is by no means 
so interesting as Mr. Motley's writings ; but its 
author was so painstaking and accurate that it 
is the '^standard,'' as we say, on its subject. 
Mr. Bancroft was born in 1800, and died when 
about ninety years old, having been Secretary 
of the Navy, Minister to England and to Ger- 
many, and having won the great respect and 
admiration of all Americans. There are not 
many people, we may be sure, who undertake 
a fifty-year job. 

Two other American historians have made 
themselves famous, Prescott and Parkman. 
Mr. Prescott, who died more than thirty years 
ago, wrote thrilling histories of the hazy fairy- 
like regions of Mexico and South America. 
"The Conquest of Mexico" and "Conquest 
of Peru " are said to have sent many an ad- 
venturous boy down to the Southern countries 
to hunt for remains of the old Aztec and Span- 
ish tales ; and the discoveries that will lighten 
up many mysterious bits of history or story are 
still to be made. Francis Parkman is a much 
later writer than Prescott, and has written of 



INTERESTING HISTORIANS. 

our own country's history, most of all in its 
relation to Indian and Canadian affairs. His 
books, too, like Motley's and Prescott's, have 
much of the excitement and brightness of 
stories about them ; so that, after all, our his- 
tories are not dull reading unless we are so un- 
fortunate as to think a thing dull for the very 
reason that it actually happened. 

Of course these are not all the Americans 
who have written good histories, but Prescott, 
Motley, Bancroft and Parkman may be called 
our Big Historical Four. Others will come up 
when we talk of men whose books have only 
lately become known ; these four are classic. 

And now that we hcive used this word, this 
may be a good place to ask what we mean by 
''classic," a good word which is nowadays 
much used and much misused. It began by 
meaning anything which belonged to one of 
the high ''classes" of the Roman people, and 
later was applied to things of a high character 
in any department. But the important thing 
to remember is, that books and music cannot 
be well said to be classic until they have lived 
long enough to receive the good opinion of 



INTERESTING HISTORIANS, 

more than one set of people. AYe do not need 
to be told that there appears a book every now 
and then which has a great sale for a year or 
two, and then is remembered no more ; so it 
will not do for a publisher to announce that he 
has just issued a ''classic''; the most he can 
say is that he hopes it will prove to be one in 
the long years to come. Of course when peo- 
ple commonly speak of the '' classics " they 
mean the old writings of the great Greeks and 
Romans, because these have endured for so 
many hundreds of years, and are as interesting 
as ever to each new set of readers. 

Perhaps ninety-nine out of every hundred 
books written are, from their very nature, made 
to live but a few years. They have to do with 
people and ways of living which belong only to 
the time at which they are published, and when 
those people and ways of living have passed 
away they are no longer pleasant reading, un- 
less they happen to be curiosities for some 
reason. So when a book is loved and re-read 
by different kinds of people for a great number 
of years, we may be sure it has something to 
do with what is called human nature — the 



INTERESTING HISTORIANS. 

thoughts and feelings of men which are always 
the same, no matter where you look for them. 
There is no American book, no matter how 
much we may like it, which we can say has yet 
proved itself to be of this kind, simply because 
our very oldest writings have only been alive 
for something like one or two hundred years. 

Now we will talk for a moment (not because 
he has any connection with w^hat has just been 
said, but because he goes with no special class 
of writers, and may as well come in here as 
anywhere) of an odd writer who was living 
about fifty years ago, and who is remembered 
chiefly by just one poem. His name was 
Edgar Allan Poe, and the poem is the famous 
''Raven." 

Mr. Poe lived only forty years, and his 
story is a sad one, like that of very few of 
our well-known writers. He began badly as 
a boy, leading a hard and rough life, though 
he had plenty of opportunities to make the 
most of himself ; and he died at a public 
hospital of a disease caused only by drunken- 
ness. ''Wonderful talent wasted," is what we 
have to say of him. 



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EDGAR ALLEN POE. 

Bornl809 — Died 1849.) 



INTERESTING HISTORIANS. 

There is more prose remaining from Poe's 
pen than poetry ; and in both there is a great 
deal that is wild and ghostly and mysterious. 
What this writer wanted was not, like Long- 
fellow, to help everybody, but to impress every- 
body with his power ; indeed, we might say to 
puzzle or to scare everybody ; and in his way 
he succeeded. 

There are a number of horrible ''ghost" 
and '' detective " stories, like the ''Black Cat," 
which is a good thing to read at night-time, 
when one wants to be made afraid to go to 
bed alone. 

Poe was a very careful writer, and knew 
how to put in all the little words and expres- 
sions which would give just the results that 
he wanted. 

Some of his poetry is very beautiful, with- 
out anything ghostl}^ or ghastly in it ; but the 
"Raven," as we have seen, is the famous work 
of his which every one thinks of on hearing his 
name. 

He tells us in one of his essays that he 
wrote this, not in any serious or despairing 
mood ; but that he planned everything about 



INTERESTING HISTORIANS. 

it which should give that impression with as 
much exactness as though it were the plan of 
a house which he was to draw. This is very 
likely. 

AVe are apt to think that poets write what 
they do just from some rush of feeling which 
comes over them, and " inspires " them to either 
solemn or gay verses ; but it is quite probable 
that they often go about their work in much 
the same careful way that other people do. 
We might notice right here that there is pretty 
good authority for the statement that even 
Lord Tennyson used a ''rhyming dictionary" 
in writing some of his poetry. 

If we are not familiar with the " Kaven " 
already, it will be a good poem to examine just 
on account of its style. We could take a 
single stanza, and ask what particular words 
and what stranoje thino's about the meter and 
rhyme serve to give it just the effect which 
it has. 

There are few stanzas more interesting in all 
our literature than this last one ; and it is a 
good example of the fact that, in poetry espe- 
cially, we may often be pleased and interested 



INTERESTING HISTORIANS. 

with what we cannot in the least understand. 
It is by no means necessary to see through 
everything in order to like it. 

" And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting, 

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; 
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is 
dreaming. 
And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow 

on the floor, 
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the 
floor 

Shall be lifted — nevermore ! " 



I 



VII. 



POETRY AND SONG. 



F Washington Irving was the first of our 



prose writers who was well known in other 
countries, Mr. William Cullen Bryant was our 
first poet of whom the same thing could be said. 
He was born thirteen years before Mr. Long- 
fellow in Massachusetts, but is always thought 
of in connection with New York City. It was 
a strange thing that so great a poet should have 
devoted the large part of his work to a mere 
newspaper ; but newspapers fifty years ago 
were perhaps more worthy of being called 
''literature" than they are to-day, and Mr. 
Bryant won the respect of every one as editor 
of the New York Evening Post. 

So early did he begin to write that he was 
only nineteen or twenty when he finished his 
great poem, '' Thanatopsis," and indeed there 



POETRY AND SONG. 

are still to be found numbers of songs and 
other sorts of writing which he produced when 
between eight and sixteen years old. We shall 
find that almost all of his poetry is of a serious 
and quiet kind ; he did not become excited 
when writing, either in the way of jollity or 
severity, so that one critic said of him that his 
poems were so cold that they should always be 
bound in fur. This quality was not altogether 
caused by Mr. Bryant himself, but partly by 
the time in which he began to write. Nowa- 
days a poet is expected not only to say sweet 
and musical things, but odd unusual ones, 
which will strike our attention and surprise us 
every now and then. This has not always been 
so, and so Mr. Bryant's work did not formerly 
seem as commonplace as much of it does now. 
This ''father of American poetry," as he has 
come to be called, wrote little of people or 
events, but instead almost always turned to 
the birds or the flowers, the sea, and especially 
the woods, for his friends and subjects. Like 
Longfellow, too, he would see little ''morals'' 
in whatever he wrote of, making sermons of 
many of his poems. Quite different from all 



POETRY AND SONG. 

this, however, was his most remarkable work, 
the translation of Homer's great epics, the 
''Iliad" and the '' Odjssey,'' into beautiful 
English verse. 

In all which he wrote there was great beauty 
and smoothness of language, and in his thoughts 
great ''majesty," as we frequently say — that 
is, something king-like, which we feel like ad- 
miring and reverencing. 

It would not be fair to forget, too, some very 
bright verses of Mr. Bryant's. For instance, 
there is " Robert of Lincoln," the quaint name 
which he gave to the bobolink ; 



** Merrily swinging on brier and weed, 

Near to the nest of his little dame, 
Over the mountain side or mead, 

Robert of Lincoln is telling his name: 
Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, 
Spink, spank, spink; 
Snug and safe is that nest of ours. 
Hidden among the summer flowers. 
Chee, chee, chee! " 



It is too bad, but quite necessary, to crowd 
as many great names as we do into one small 
paper. For a moment or two we must speak 
of one w^hich will take us back to old Cam- 



POETRY AND SONG. 

bridge again, Mr. James Russell Lowell, who 
at the time of his recent death was undoubtedly 
our greatest living poet. Not only poet, either, 
but teacher, essayist, lecturer, critic and states- 
man. All these names rightfully belong to this 
distinguished man. Whatever he undertook he 
seems to have done well, and this, too, in more 
than one kind of poetry. No matter what style 
we may prefer, we shall find it here. 

Mr. Lowell lived at Cambridge as a profes- 
sor in Harvard College, like Longfellow, and 
abroad as minister of our Government to foreign 
powers, like Irving and Bancroft and Motley. 
He seems to have been greatly loved by those 
who knew him best, and by almost all his 
readers. By far his most original literary 
work is contained in the ''Biglow Papers," 
-which were political satires such as we saw in 
Revolutionary times, written in the dialect of 
the New England country people. They be- 
came immensely popular throughout our coun- 
try, and played quite an important part in some 
of the campaigns. They were supposed to be 
the work of a country fellow called Hosea Big- 
low, who sometimes wrote poems on other than 



POETRY AND SONG. 

political subjects, such as '' The Courtin'." 
These papers are an important part of our lit- 
erature, because they will always preserve in a 
classic form the dialect in which they were 
written. 

It would be useless to try to tell anything, in 
this short space, of the beautiful things in Mr. 
Lowell's serious poetry. Perhaps his finest 
work can be found in ''The Vision of Sir 
Launfal," and in the ode which he wrote after 
the War, in memory of the Harvard graduates 
who had fallen in battle. The passage in this 
ode beginning, " O, beautiful! my Country! 
ours once more ! " is one of the finest things in 
our literature. 

It is not so necessary to quote anything from 
this writer as from many, because every one 
wants to read him for himself, and because one 
could hardly select flowers from such a bound- 
less garden. We should speak one word of 
Mr. Lowell's prose writings, which are chiefly 
in the line of essays, and which in their depart- 
ment are more certainly our best American 
work than the poetry of Lowell is in the other 
department. 



POETRY AND SONG. 

In taking a quick glance at our literature, as 
we are doing in these papers, it is not hard to 
choose the great names over which we must 
pause, but more difficult to be sure about the 
lesser ones. 

But now as we are in the midst of poetry 
and song, we should think for a moment of 
Stephen Foster, who lived in both Pennsyl- 
vania and Ohio, and who wrote words that are 
well known wherever Americans live. Some 
of these are, " Nelly was a Lady," ''My Old 
Kentucky Home," and ''The Old Folks at 
Home" ("Suwanee River''). They are inter- 
esting because they are so thoroughly American, 
and although they are not, of course, very much 
in the way of literature, and are popular largelj^ 
on account of the sweet tunes which have car- 
ried them everywhere, many of us would rather 
have written one of these, which everybody 
sings, than some great poem which only a few 
would love. 

There have always been two classes of song 
writers : those who have preferred to write 
what every one else could enjoy, and those 
who have preferred work so good or so great 



POETRY AND SONG. 

as to be above a great mass of people. Of 
course neither one of these writers is to be 
des'pised. 

We must stop for another moment at the 
name of Thomas Buchanan Read, who, like 
Foster, lived in Pennsylvania and Ohio be- 
tween 1840 and 1860, and who wrote a number 
of unimportant poems. He wrote one, also, 
which ought not to be considered unimportant, 
since it is to be studied and enjoyed for its 
lovely language and flowing, lazy style. This 
is ''Drifting," a description of the famous har- 
bor of Naples ; and just as we chose some lines 
from Longfellow's '' Sandalphon " to illustrate 
his quality of '' musicalness," so let us choose 
these from Mr. Read : 



** My soul to-day 
Is far away, 
Sailing the Vesuvian bay; 
My winged boat, 
A bird afloat, 
Swims round the purple peaks remote; 



''Round purple peaks 
It sails, and seeks 
Blue inlets, with their crystal creeks, 



POETRY AND SONG. 

Where high rocks throw, 
Through deeps below, 
A duplicated golden glow. 

• • • • • • • 

**I heed not, if 

My rippling skiff 
Float swift or slow from cliff to cliff; 

With dreamful eyes 

M}" spirit lies 
Under the walls of Paradise." 



YIII. 

ESSAYIST, POET AND NOVELIST. 

TT^MERSON is the only really great American 
prose writer outside of the historians and 
the story-tellers, or in other words the only great 
American essayist. Yet there are a number of 
other men who have written charmingly in this 
line, and whose work is in some ways more sol- 
idly satisfactory than Mr. Emerson's, though 
not so handsomely done. One of the earliest of 
these was Bayard Taylor. We can talk of him 
with a clear conscience, for he was essayist, 
poet and novelist in one. 

It was, indeed, as a poet that he most wished 
to be remembered ; he began his literary work 
about fifty years ago, by printing a little vol- 
ume of verses, and he complained in after life 
that w^hile he wanted to be known as a poet, he 
was celebrated only as a traveler, a wanderer 



ESSAYIST, POET AND NOVELIST. 

over the whole world. For his books of travel, 
eleven in number, and written from Europe, 
Asia, Africa and the islands of the sea, were 
what really introduced him to readers at home. 
In those days it was not possible, as it is now, 
for almost any one to take at least a short 
journey outside his own country ; so (although 
nowadays there are few books of travel which 
should claim our attention, since we can see so 
much better with our own eyes than with other 
people's) Taylor's letters from strange coun- 
tries, charmingly written as they were, proved 
a success. His poetry was much of it very 
good, too, and the great amount of his lit- 
erary work in many different directions is one 
of the most interesting things to remember 
about him. 

Mr. George William Curtis is so recent a 
writer that some of the youngest of us may 
have seen him or heard his voice ; yet his works 
have been known and loved for so many years 
that you will find his picture on the old, old 
games of "Authors,'' with ''Potiphar Papers," 
''Prue and I" and ''Nile Notes" around it. 
These essays are some of the best specimens 



ESSAYIST, POET AND NOVELIST 

of English which we have in our literature, and 
have always had the effect of making their 
readers respect and love the author. They 
were written long enough ago to have a little 
of the slowness about them which we have 
spoken of as belonging to the earlier part of 
the century ; but they are bright enough, for 
all that. Mr. Curtis has been best known in 
recent years as the "Easy Chair" editor m 
"Harper's Magazine." 

Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson is another 
essayist belonging to both the readers of yes- 
terday and of to-day, who has done well what- 
ever he has undertaken. He was the colonel 
of a regiment of colored men in the late war, 
and has written an account of his life in this 
capacity ; he has written a number of poems, 
and large numbers of entertaining essays, and 
is a most charming lecturer, as well. Many of 
us are possibly acquainted with his "Young 
Folks' History of the United States," which we 
may have had to study at school, but which we 
surely must have enjoyed none the less. These 
authors, who began to write in days less bus- 
tling and hurried than our own, and who have 




RALPH AVALDO EMERSON. 

(Born 1803 — Died 1882.) 



ESSAYIST, POET AND NOVELIST 

lived to bring to us some of the good things of 
the earlier life (while not failing to join in with 
the young life of to-day) are especially worthy 
of our attention and admiration. But few of 
the members of our ''old school'' of literature, 
as it is called, now remain. 

One good friend of all American readers, 
young and old, is Dr. Edward Everett Hale, of 
Boston, who has been writing, and preaching, 
and doing good work in every way for years 
and years, and who is without any doubt one 
of the most charming of our literary men. It 
matters not whether he is writing for children 
or old people, whether it is a jolly story or a 
serious essay, there is in every sentence perfect 
simplicity, and hearty kindness and literary 
skill. For entertainment no one needs any- 
thing better ; for instruction he is a sort of in- 
spired schoolteacher ; and if one wants to study 
good '' style " in the use of English he will find 
Dr. Hale's writings a splendid place. 

We have already hinted of his fondness for 
young folks ; he has perhaps written more for 
them than for any others, and his '' Ten Times 
One," and ''In His Name" have done a great 



ESSAYIST, POET AND NOVELIST 

work all over the United States. This latter 
story is in some respects the best book of its 
kind which has ever been written. Thirty years 
ago he wrote a famous little story called ' ' The 
Man Without a Country," which we shall still 
find circulating in the bookstores as though it 
had lately been published. Dr. Hale's motto 
has become as widely known as himself : ''Look 
up and not down, look forward and not back, 
look out and not in, and lend a hand," and 
gives us the idea of his whole life and work. 

Others of these good prose writers are spring- 
ing up all the time, so that we cannot guess who 
of them will remain or become famous. Mr. 
Charles Dudley Warner and Donald G. Mitchell 
(who wrote ''The Reveries of a Bachelor," and 
who calls himself "Ik Marvel ") are good writers 
of essays whom we have time only to mention. 
Wise men are continually adding to the fine 
American histories. Dr. Ridpath, Dr. Fiske 
and Dr. Moses Coit Tyler are some of these. 
It is the duty of every one who wishes to be- 
come well educated to be well acquainted with 
this kind of literature. Every one reads stories, 
and most people read poetry of one kind or 



ESSAYIST, POET AND NOVELIST. 

another ; but you may know that a person has 
brains who goes farther than that. 

One other kind of American literature we 
must speak of in this paper : that which had 
some connection with what we call the ''late" 
war, the War of the Eebellion. Of course any 
great event of that kind would have its effect 
on the writing of the men and women of the 
time, just as we saw that there was literature 
of the Revolutionary War. Much of that con- 
nected with the recent war time had something 
to do with the question of slavery, which then 
was being discussed all over the country, and 
which was settled a little later. 

There were many stories and poems con- 
nected with the events of the time, there were 
great speeches made and afterward printed, 
and of course there were histories written. Two 
of the most important of these last are ' ' The 
American Conflict," written by Mr. Horace 
Greeley, a prominent Northerner, and ''The 
Rise and Fall of the Confederate States of 
America," written by Jefferson Davis, the 
President of the Confederate States. Of 
course the great body of all this kind of 



ESSAYIST, POET AND NOVELIST, 

literature lives but a short time ; the real history 
of any event must be written so long a time after 
it happened that the excitement and hard feel- 
ing connected with it may have passed away. 
The three great poets of New England — 
Longfellow, Low^ell and Whittier — all wrote 
war-time poems ; but the famous book of the 
4.ime was a story, ''Uncle Tom's Cabin," by 
Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Mrs. Stowe did 
not believe in the slavery of the colored people, 
and thought that a good way to fight it would 
be to wTite a story of life in the slave States, 
describing the sad things connected with the 
system. So it was that this book came to be 
published. Many of the people who lived in 
the slave States claimed that it was not a fair 
description of things as they were in that part 
of the country, and others claimed that it was. 
However that may be, the book was spread 
everywhere in a wonderful way, and has prob- 
ably been more widely read than any other 
published in the United States. It has been 
translated into about forty foreign languages, 
and is still read everywhere. Mrs. Stowe wrote 
other stories, but none which deserved to be, 




HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 

(Author of ♦* Uncle Tom's Cabin." Born 1811.) 



ESSAYIST, POET AND NOVELIST. 

or were, as well known as ''Uncle Tom's 
Cabin." 

Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, a finely educated 
Boston lady, wrote the most popular and most 
beautiful song of war time, the " Battle Hymn 
of the Republic," beginning: 

** Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.'' 

This will no doubt live and be read long after 
we have forgotten many things about our sad 
Civil War. We are forgetting much of its 
sadness day by day, and the literature of the 
present time which is worth anything at all 
belongs to our whole country, and remembers 
that America is at peace, and that all her peo- 
ple are brothers and sisters. You young folks, 
especially, though you may read the history of 
your country and understand its happenings, 
need never know, and can never know, the hard 
feelings which once disturbed our people, and 
which now God has turned into brotherly kind- 
ness and peace. 



IX. 



A WIDELY-LOYED POET. 



CONNECTED with war time in the thoughts 
of many who were liYing then, but also 
with more pleasant things in the memory of 
every one, is Mr. John Greenleaf Whittier's 
name. He has been, next to Longfellow, our 
most widely-loved American poet, and was like 
Longfellow in many ways — of a good New 
England family, of a pure and noble Christian 
character, and a friend of God and of every man. 
Unlike his great neighbor and friend, he was 
brought up among simple farming people, who 
of course had no great amount of school or 
college education. He had to work hard in his 
old Massachusetts country home when a mere 
boy, and knew all about the driving of cows 
and the other daily bits of labor and fun with 
which only farm boys are acquainted. He 



A W/D ELY-LOVED POET. 

gained in his after life a great deal of knowledge 
which his own father and mother had never had, 
but he did not lose the simple ways and the boy- 
ish love of God and the beautiful world which 
his earlier days gave him. 

For very many years before his recent death 
he was the pride of all the best Americans, and 
we can say as we did of Mr. Longfellow, that 
whatever people thought of his poetry, there 
seems to be no one who knew him who did not 
love him. He had the same thoughtfulness in 
little ways. You can find numbers of auto- 
graphs and little letters from his hand all over 
the country, so willing was he to please people 
when it was in his power. There are many in- 
teresting things which one may learn in reading 
of his life and his personal habits and friends. 

Whittier's poetry does not have the polished 
and elegant ''finish'' (a word which we use 
alike for verses and furniture — varnish) which 
Mr. Longfellow's fine education and studies in 
foreign countries gave to his ; instead it is very 
simple, and for that reason many people have 
foolishly thought little of it. Perhaps his best- 
known long poem is "Snowbound," which con- 



A WIDELY-LOVED POET. 

tained pictures of the New England winter life 
as he had known it when a boy, and passages 
of which we need not fear to compare with any 
American poetry ; but it is his hundreds of 
quaint shorter poems which have gone every- 
where, and which one might say that every one 
knows. 

All young folks like to read (and recite, too) 
''Barbara Frietchie" and ''In School Days," 
and one of his most pleasing writings is the 
well-known "Barefoot Boy." We will read a 
few lines of this poem : 



"Blessings on thee, little man, 
Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan! 
With thy turned-up pantaloons, 
And thy merry whistled tunes; 
With thy red lip, redder still 
Kissed by strawberries on the hill; 
With the sunshine on thy face, 
Through thy torn brim's jaunty grace; 
From my heart I give thee joy — 
1 was once a barefoot boy. 



"0 for festal dainties spread, 
Like my bowl of milk and bread — 
Pewter spoon and bowl of wood, 
On the door-stone gray and rude! 
O'er me, like a regal tent, 
Cloudy-ribbed, the sunset bent. 
Purple-curtained, fringed with gold. 
Looped in many a wind-swung fold; 




JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 

(Born 1807 — Died 1892.) 



A WIDELY-LOVED POET. 

Whiie for music came the play 
Of the pied frogs' orchestra ; 
And, to light the noisy choir, 
Lit the fly his lamp of fire. 
I was monarch: pomp and joy 
Waited on the barefoot boy ! " 

We have already hinted that Mr. Whittier 
was an unusually true Christian ; he belonged 
to the old-fashioned Society of Friends (whom 
we usually call "Quakers"), and always used 
the quaint " thee" and ''thou" of that church. 
Many of his most lovely poems have come to 
be used as favorite hymns in our singing books ; 
and we cannot tell but they may be using them 
in this way in Heaven, now that the dear old 
man is there to join the chorus. One of his 
very last bits of writing was a birthday poem 
addressed to an old friend of his, which contains 
some beautiful lines that we may like to see, 
though they may be too much the w^ords of an 
old man for young folks to really understand : 



*' Among the thousands who with hail and cheer 

Will welcome thy new year, 
How few of all have passed, as thou and I, 

So many milestones b}'! 

'^Far off, and faint as echoes of a dream, 
The songs of boyhood seem, 



A WIDELY-LOVED POET. 

Yet on our autumn boughs, unflown with spring, 
The evening thrushes sing. 

**The hour draws near, howe'er delayed and late, 

When at the Eternal Gate 
We leave the words and works we call our own, 

And lift void hands alone 

** For love to fill. Our nakedness of soul 

Brings to that Gate no toll; 
Giftless, we come to Him who all things gives, 

And live because He lives ! " 

The friend to whom this was written, on his 
eighty-third birthday, was Dr. Oliver Wendell 
Holmes, perhaps the last man left on earth of 
a great group of our best American waiters. 
For a long, long time he has been cheering and 
helping his countrymen with his work, though 
not by any means as a writer only. Some of 
Dr. Holmes' poetry we may count among our 
best, and a still larger amount of his prose. 
Perhaps his most famous single poem is ''The 
Chambered Nautilus," which contains the great 
lines : 



"Build thee more stately mansions, my soul, 
As the swift seasons roll ! " 



But a very large part of his work has been in 



A WIDELY-LOVED POET, 

the line of mere merry-makiDg, like the story 
of the ''Oue-Hoss Shay," and great numbers of 
what we call ''occasional" poems — that is, 
those written for some special time, as for birth- 
days or anniversaries or historical celebrations. 
There is one not of this kind which we may rank 
with "The Chambered Nautilus," and that is 
''The Last Leaf." It was a favorite of Pres- 
ident Lincoln's, and contains some fine lines. 

Dr. Holmes has been a busy physician 
as well as a poet, and his work is perhaps a 
little hasty for this reason. His best prose 
writings are those which charmed our fathers 
and mothers years ago, called "The Breakfast 
Table Series," which are not stories, and not 
essays, but a happy and odd mixture of the 
two. We may well be thankful that this merry 
gentleman has been spared till our time, with a 
pen and a heart which have neither of them 
grown old. 

There are three poets with whom we are 
probably not well acquainted, but with whom we 
certainly should be some day. The first one is 
Sidney Lanier, a charming writer from the 
Southern part of our country, who has been not 



A WIDELY-LOVED POET, 

widely read, but who, in the opinion of some of 
our wisest men, if he had lived to be an older 
man, would have become one of our greatest 
poets. The other names are those of Mr. Ed- 
mund Clarence Stedman and Mr. Thomas Bailey 
Aldrich, who have done very fine work in the 
matter of writing poetry. Mr. Aldrich is best 
known from his beautiful ''Babie Bell." 



X, 



FRIENDS OF THE YOUNG PEOPLE. 

NOWADAYS we have numbers of books 
marked ''A Story for Boys," or "A 
Story for Girls," but it is not these which the 
boys and the girls most truly like. It is rather 
those which are written so brightly and skill- 
fully that old and young enjoy them alike. 

Louisa Alcott should perhaps not be put 
among these recent writers, since it is now 
man}^ years that she has been knovrn as a 
favorite ; but we may certainly speak of her 
first among these friends of the young folks. 
"Little Women" was, not long ago, the great 
story book for all the girls, and although the 
style of story books has changed since it was 
written, the girls of to-day have not forgotten 
it. And the boys, while they never confessed 
to reading it, could probably discuss it quite as 



FRIENDS OF THE YOUNG PEOPLE. 

intelligently as their sisters. "Little Men'^ 
and "Jo's Boys" kept up the story, as we 
always feel that good stories should be kept 
up ; and others of Miss Alcott's books were 
widely read, both in this country and elsewhere. 

She was a New England lady, the daughter 
of a great scholar, and seems to have been the 
true woman and kind friend which we should 
expect. There are many things in her stories 
which one can criticise when he sets about it, 
but on the whole they have always been thought 
bright and true and helpful. They opened up 
a new kind of story-writing in America, for 
which we should be truly thankful. 

"Little Lord Fauntleroy" seems to have 
charmed every one who has read it, in spite of 
the fact that it is neither a fairy tale nor in any 
way a story of every-day life. Mrs. Burnett, 
the author, is one of our best-known American 
novelists, but has made her greatest success 
in this story for children. A kind of sketch 

Other American writers of experience who 
devote their time to writing for young people 
are John T. Trowbridge, author of "Neighbor 
Jackwood," William O. Stoddard, who wrote 




LOUISA M. ALCOTT. 

(Born 1833— Died 1388.) 



FRIENDS OF THE YOUNG PEOPLE. 

'' Guert Ten Eyck " and ''Chuck Purdy," Eos- 
siter Johnson, author of "Phaeton Rogers," 
one of the best books for boys, Elbridge S. 
Brooks, who wrote of ''Historic Boys" and 
"Historic Girls," Kirk Munroe, Kate Douglas 
Wiggin, author of "The Birds' Christmas 
Carol," and others of equal prominence. 

Few fairy stories are written in America. 
Most children prefer nowadays to think of the 
people in books as really true. But we have 
had some favorite " wonder stories" which we 
need not be ashamed of, and the prince of the 
writers of these is Mr. Frank Stockton. Mr. 
Stockton writes wonder stories for young folks 
and old folks, and all of a delightfully funny 
and irresistible kind. His most famous sketches 
are " The Lady or the Tiger? " which has puz- 
zled people for years and years, and "The 
Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Ale- 
shine," a shipwreck story which will make the 
soberest person laugh until the tears roll down 
his cheeks. The great thing about Mr. Stock- 
ton's work is that he always tells the most im- 
possible things as though they were solemn 
facts, and people always like to be imposed 



FRIENDS OF THE YOUNG PEOPLE. 

upon in this way. Of course none of his writ- 
ings are of a serious character, or of a kind 
which one would expect to live a long time ; 
but they are worthy of being called litera- 
ttire because they are done in the very best 
English, and told in a pure and charmingly 
simple style. 

So many of these good story writers have 
arisen in the past few years that one does not 
know which ones to speak of. Mary Mapes 
Dodge, the editor of ''St. Nicholas," and the 
author of ' ' Hans Brinker ; or, the Silver Skates," 
is another young folks' favorite. A very large 
amount of writing has been done in the line of 
what we call '' Sabbath-school books," some of 
which deserve the name, and many of which 
do not. Surely the stories which are written 
for the plain purpose of helping people to be 
better, as such books are supposed to be, are 
worthy a good deal of attention ; and yet there 
is little in this line that we should call real lit- 
erature, because it is a sad fact that only a few 
of the people w^ho can really write well have 
given time to this kind of work. 

There have been five women who have given 



FRIENDS OF THE YOUNG PEOPLE. 

their lime to it, and have been of no one knows 
how much help in the way of making books 
which are thoroughly well written and interest- 
ing, and at the same time honestly helpful. 
Mrs. Adeline D. T. Whitney is one of these ; 
her stories are charming ones of New England 
life, and among the best of them are ''Faith 
Gartney's Girlhood," and ''Patience Strong's 
Outings." Miss Anna and Miss Susan Warner 
are the second and third ; they wrote together 
a number of books, and Miss Susan AYarner's 
"Wide, Wide World" has had a remarkably 
large number of readers, though it is by no 
means her best work. Mrs. Alden (Pansy) is 
at present the best-known of all writers of this 
class, and her books have indeed done a won- 
derful work in bettering the style of Sabbath- 
school literature. Her "Ester Ried" alone 
would have been something worth living for, 
and other books of hers have been translated 
into French, Norwegian, Japanese, Armenian, 
and other languages. To have her record of 
help given to young and old is better, after all, 
than a hole in AYestminster Abbey for one's 
grave. 



FRIENDS OF THE YOUNG PEOPLE. 

The last of these five is Mrs. Lothrop (Mar- 
garet Sidney) , who is properly the successor to 
Miss Alcott, her ''Five Little Peppers" being 
always classed with ''Little Women." These 
two authors go hand in hand together in public 
regard, their books being in equal demand in 
the libraries all over the country. This library 
test, after all, is a pretty sure indication of the 
popularity of a writer. 

Margaret Sidney by birth and education was 
equipped for her task. It is a singular coinci- 
dence that her home is the beautiful "Way- 
side," Concord, Mass., where the Alcotts lived 
when young people, and the principal features 
of "Little Women" were daily occurrences. 
Afterward, in 1852, Mr. Bronson Alcott, 
Louisa's father, sold the place to Nathaniel 
Hawthorne, whose home it was until his death, 
in 1864. 

All poets are the children's friends, and Mr. 
James Whitcomb Eiley most of all. Every 
person has his own private opinion of what a 
poet really is, and to-day many people turn up 
their noses when Mr. Riley is called one. As 
he is a writer of but a few years' standing no 



FRIENDS OF THE YOUNG PEOPLE, 

one can undertake to decide the question yet ; 
but if he is a poet at all he is the poet of the 
children, and of the great body of Americans 
besides. He is best known to us (though not 
because he does not write charmingly in good 
English) as a dialect writer ; first, in the lan- 
guage of the Western farmer, and second, in 
the language of the small boy. 

Lowell, as we have seen, made the New Eng- 
land country dialect famous by the ' ' Biglow 
Papers," and Mr. Riley has done the same 
thing for the Hoosiers, as Indiana people call 
themselves. No one seems to know whether 
to be most pleased by his farmers or his chil- 
dren. ''Knee-Deep in June,'' and "Thoughts 
fer the Discuraged Farmer" on the one hand, 
and "Little Orphant Allie " and her " gobul- 
uns," with " The Raggedy Man" on the other, 
are perhaps the most famous poems — for we 
will risk calling them poems, after all. Then 
"The South Wind and the Sun" and "Don't 
Cry" we will take as examples of those in 
ordinary English. They are almost all short, 
and when we take up one of the little volumes 
of them we find it hard work to lay it down. 



FRIENDS OF THE YOUNG PEOPLE, 
Let US look at one of these : 

"■ ' How would Willie like to go 

To the Land of Thus-and-So? 

Everything is proper there; 

All the children comb their hair 

Smoother than the fur of cats, 

Or the nap of high silk hats; 

Every face is clean and white 

As a lily washed in light; 

Never vaguest soil or speck 

Found on forehead, throat or neck — 

Ever}^ little crimpled ear, 

In and out, as pure and clear 

Asgthe cherry-blossom's blow, 

In the Land of Thus-and-So.' 



'" Ohl the Land of Thus-and-So — 
Isn't it delightful, though?' 
'Yes,' lisped Willie, answering me 
Somewhat slow and doubtfully; 
' Must be awful nice, but I 
Ruther wait till by and by 
'Fore I go there — maybe when 
I be dead I'll go there then. 
But ' — the little troubled face 
Closer pressed in my embrace — 
* Le's don't never ever go 
To the Land of Thus-and-So.' " 

To some people words are only things to be 
used as they have always been used ; others 
can make and choose, and turn and twist them, 
until our language becomes something newer 
and greater than it ever has seemed before. 
James Whitcomb Riley is one of these. 



XI. 



WRITERS OF POETRY, 



TWO writers of poetry certainly remain 
whose work has lately been talked of 
quite widely. In the case of the first this is 
not because he began to write only of late, 
since for a number of years he was a prominent 
American — perhaps not so much as a poet as 
a curiosity. This man was Walt Whitman, 
who died not long ago in his home in New 
Jersey, and who wrote a few things which were 
generally thought to be good, and a great many 
things which most peopte thought to be mere 
trash. There is no writer who cannot find 
some friends to call him a great man, and so it 
happens that there are a few strange people 
who call Walt Whitman our greatest American 
poet. There are but few who call him a poet 
at all. 



WRITERS OF POETRY. 

He was an odd man who lived very much by 
himself, always went about in a slouch hat and 
an outing shirt, and wrote like nobody else in 
the world. He believed (or pretended to) that 
it was the duty of a poet to say just what he 
thought in whatever sort of language he liked ; 
and so he wrote a number of very coarse things 
which no one should care to read. He did not 
think it was at all necessary to pay any atten- 
tion to rhyme or meter in order to write poetry, 
and so the large part of his writings you would 
never suspect of being intended for poetry un- 
less they were printed in the form of verses ; 
yet he had a sort of a rhythm, instead of the 
meter, something like that of the Book of 
Psalms in the Bible. Some things in his works 
are not queer, but are of good style, and quite 
beautiful; perhaps the best is "My Captain," 
written after the death of President Lincoln. 
Walt Whitman thought that he was the great 
poet of the people, because he did not follow 
the rules of poetry or pay attention to the 
scholars ; but it is only in foreign countries 
that any one thinks he is America's favorite, 
for neither you nor I nor the common people 




WALT WHITMAN. 

(Born 1819 — Died 1892.) 



WRITERS OF POETRY, 

would either wish or are able to understand 
much of his work. We will look at a few lines 
from his "Miracles of Nature," for no other 
purpose than to see the strange style : 

** To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, 

PI very inch of space is a miracle, 

Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with 

the same. 
Every cubic foot of the interior swarms with the same. 

''To me the sea is a continual miracle, 

The tishes that swim, the rocks, the motion of the waves, the 

ships with men in them — 
What stranger miracles are there?" 

After this it is only fair to give also a verse 
from '^My Captain'' : 

*'My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still; 
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will; 
But the ship — the ship is anchored safe, its voyage closed 

and done ; 
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won. 
Exult, O, shores! and ring, 0, bells! 

But I, with silent tread, 
Walk the spot my captain lies, 
Fallen cold and dead." 

Emily Dickinson has been read but a very 
little time. She was a New p]ngland lady who 
wrote entirely for her own pleasure, and not at 
all " for publication," so that it was only after 
her death that her poems were printed. They 



WRITERS OF POETRY. 

were edited by her good friend Colonel Hig- 
ginson ; and it is he who has told us many 
strange and interesting things about this quiet 
little poet. It seems sad that Miss Dickinson 
could not have lived to enjoy the friendships 
which her poems would have made for her ; 
for the first volume of them became the most 
popular book of the year in which it was 
printed. 

They are all short and quaint, and few of 
them would be of much interest to the younger 
ones of us ; but some day we shall surely wish 
to know them, and if in ten or twenty years 
the world should carelessly have forgotten these 
poems (which it is not likely to), we may per- 
haps bring them forward again. 

Miss Dickinson, too, cared very little about 
rules of rhyming, and so it often happens that 
a verse of hers sounds odd if read aloud, 
though it might seem all right if read only by 
the eyes ; the meter, however, and (what ig 
more important) the sweet and bright thoughts 
follow the best rules in the world, and the 
poems are perhaps the best of their kind which 
have been written for many a year. We will 



WRITERS OF POETRY, 

read just a few verses, to see what they are 
like. 

Here is a short song about ''A Day" s 

" ril tell you how the sun rose — 

A ribbon at a time; 
The steeples swam in amethyst — 

The news like squirrels ran. 
The hills untied their bonnets — 

The bobolinks begun. 
Then I said softly to myself: 

That must have been the sun. 

*' But how he set I know not; 
There seemed a purple stile, 
Which little yellow boys and girls 

Were climbing all the while; 
Till, when they reached the other side, 

A dominie in gray 
Put gently up the evening bars, 

And led the flock away." 

She knew the bees and flowers and butter- 
flies, and tells of the snake as the ''narrow fel- 
low in the grass," and of the robin ''in red 
cravat," and touches whatever she writes of 
with the same strange beauty. 

We come now to the bigge^ (not the great- 
est) part of our American literature, and now 
that we are here have little to say of it. 

This is the part that makes and sells the 



WRITERS OF POETRY, 

most books, that fills the most shelves in the 
stores, that composes the packages of the 
agents in the railroad trains, and that the 
great majority of our people read to by far 
the greatest extent. Of course we mean the 
stories — the novels. They will not occupy 
much of our space, because the large majority 
of them are not good literature, and because it 
has happened that w^e have never had a really 
great American novelist, like Scott or Dickens 
or Thackeray in England (unless we should 
except Nathaniel Hawthorne) , though we have 
had really great poets and historians. Some 
books of this kind we have already spoken of — 
those of Fenimore Cooper, and Mrs. Stowe, and 
Mrs. Burnett and Frank Stockton — and there 
is a great crush of story-writers coming up 
nowadays, some of whom may turn out to be 
really great. Perhaps the most popular Ameri- 
can novel of late years has been (like Scott's) 
historical — General Wallace's " Ben-Hur : A 
Tale of the Christ," which we all either have 
read or wish to read. But the most of them 
are of a dashing, lively style which does not 
belong to historical fields. 



WRITERS OF POETRY, 

Our best novelists are generally thought to 
be Mr. Henry James and Mr. W. D. Howells, 
though they are neither of them of the dashing 
and lively sort, nor can they continue to be 
widely read for a long time after they die, since 
they write of things and people that will be 
forgotten in a few years. Mr. Howells has 
written some exceedingly clever little plays 
(the funniest of which are ''The Elevator" 
and ''The Sleeping-Car"), and some fine 
stories, the best of which is, perhaps, "A 
Modern Instance." He is also called the great 
American "realist." We can scarcely take 
time to explain just what is meant by this, but 
in general the realist writes about things just 
exactly as they are, and the other kind of man, 
whom we call the "idealist," of things as they 
might be, or as he thinks they should be. You 
will see that the realist is nearest the historian, 
and the idealist nearest the writer of fairy tales. 
We have the same division of workers in paint- 
ing and sculpture. There is a great statue of 
Washington in front of the United States Capi- 
tol representing him with bare arms and neck, 
and with the simple robe of the old-time Roman 



WRITERS OF POETRY, 

citizen. Now of course President Washington 
never went about the streets in any such cos- 
tume, and would have been thought crazy if he 
had, so many people have made a deal of fun 
of this statue. 

Such people are "realists." Others, when 
looking at the statue, think of the ways in 
which George Washington was like a Roman 
citizen, and also remember that the Greek 
and Roman costumes were the most graceful 
that the world has ever seen ; and these are 
not displeased by it. 

The dispute between these two kinds of peo- 
ple is a wide one, and extremely hard to under- 
stand ; but it will be good practice for us, in 
reading stories, to make up our minds whether 
we think they belong to realism or idealism. 
It will be a still better plan to avoid reading 
stories which are of such small value that it 
makes no difference to any one to which class 
they belong. 



XII. 



MODERN NOVELISTS. 



AMONG modern novelists all readers have 
their favorites ; and even among those 
who are considered worthy of special mention 
it is hard to make any choice. Let us look 
for a moment at one particular class of story- 
writers — those whose writings have to do with 
some particular locality. In the paper on 
Irving we spoke of what is meant by ''local 
literature/' and since his day almost every part 
of our country has had its turn in short stories 
and novels. Of course when a good writer 
turns to some interesting locality his work is 
all the more pleasant; but it is a mistake to 
suppose that any one can get up a good story 
by laying his scene in any particular place. 

There was a time when the new settlements 
of the West were the scene of much story- 



MODERN NOVELISTS. 

writing, and among the literature of that kind 
are Edward Eggleston's " Hoosier School- 
master," and Joaquin Miller's and Bret Harte's 
stories and verses, together with a great deal 
of poor writing. Nowadays it is the South to 
which story-tellers turn, and although (as we 
have said before) the magazines have been 
overrun with stories and sketches of the ne- 
groes and ''poor whites" of this part of the 
country, there is in the Southern States mate- 
rial for very interesting literary work. Four 
writers are worthy of mention who have made 
use of this in widely different ways : George 
W. Cable, who writes charmingly of the Creole 
country about New Orleans; Charles Egbert 
Craddock (Miss Murfree), whose stories are 
of the white mountaineers of Tennessee and 
North Carolina; Thomas Nelson Page, who 
has lately become popular through his sketches 
of Virginia life, and Joel Chandler Harris, who 
gathered the ' ' Uncle Remus Stories " from the 
old colored people of the South, and wrote 
them down with great skill for white readers. 

There are other classes of our literature about 
which a deal might be written if there were 



MODERN NOVELISTS, 

time. We might speak of the humorists, such 
as Artemus Ward and Mark Twain, whose 
work is what we call ''characteristically Ameri- 
can," but of course not very much in the way 
of literature. We ought to consider a class of 
books which are called ' ' stories written with a 
purpose," and W'hich have of late received not 
a little attention. Now of course every story 
is written with some sort of a purpose in the 
mind of the author ; but it frequently happens 
that a man will have an unusual theory or idea 
about either religion or politics, or the way in 
w^hich people should live, and instead of writing 
essays or sermons to explain what he thinks, 
he says: ''I will write a story, and make the 
people in it live just as I think they should, 
and show how finely they get along." We have 
numbers of novels of this kind, and they are 
extremely likely to be of little use, either as 
novels or anything else. In the first place 
people do not care to read stories which they 
see are only essays or sermons with story-books' 
clothes on them ; and in the second place the 
man who w^rites such a book has everything in 
his own hands, and is able to make the story 



MODERN NOVELISTS. 

end just as he chooses, so that it proves nothing 
to those who read it, unless they believe that 
things would happen in fact as they do in the 
book. One of the best books of this kind 
which have appeared for a long time is ' ' Look- 
ing Backward," written by Edward Bellamy to 
defend a theory which is called " nationalism." 

We must carefully make a difference between 
books which have a good purpose running right 
through them (as all good books will), like a 
gold thread in a piece of cloth, and those which 
are poor stories, with the purpose pasted on in 
patches on the outside. 

Another kind of literature on which consider- 
able time might be spent is that included in 
short stories, which have only of late come into 
great favor. Some of the best writers of these 
have already been spoken of among the other 
authors, but we nowadays see in the maga- 
zines the names of many bright literary people 
who devote their work almost entirely to this 
very pleasant kind of literature. It is, in fact, 
the magazines which have brought about this 
change. Some of them have been going on for 
a number of years, but after all the magazine 



MODERN NOVELISTS, 

as it is to-day is quite a late affair. We all know 
the names of the great monthly magazines of 
America. In these the literature is of the best 
kind, and much of it will no doubt last for a long 
time. We have already said that to-day we de- 
mand that pieces of literature shall be short, so 
that busy people may enjoy them, and the maga- 
zines have answered this demand. They have 
done another fine thing ; they have made it 
possible for any one who can write a good 
article or story to get it printed, and to be 
well paid for it. It is only very lately that 
this could be said. Now probably one person 
in ten, among people of any education, has 
written something intended for publication; 
and although most of them have never seen 
anything of their own published, they have the 
chance of knowing that if they can do any 
really good work in this line it will be sure to 
find its place in the world. 

This magazine tendency, as we might call it, 
is one of the most interesting things which we 
see in the literature of to-day. Something like 
it, but very far below it, is what we might call 
the newspaper tendency. At present the news- 



MODERN NOVELISTS. 

papers try to do far more than to simply collect 
the happenings of every day and give them to 
the people ; they try to furnish literature — 
stories, essays, poems — and as there are few 
of them which are able to do this well, we have 
a great mass of newspaper reading which might 
much better be destroyed before being printed. 
The newspaper English is apt to be the worst 
English, and if we are not very careful we shall 
find in a few years that the reading of news- 
papers among our American people has done 
real harm to our literature which cannot be 
cured for a long, long time. 

We have now come to the end of our study 
of the literature of America. We have seen 
how it started from the few efforts of those who 
came to this country from England, and who 
told what they found here for the benefit of 
their friends at home ; how it grew with the 
growing nation, overcoming all the hard things 
which lay in its Avay, until now we are building 
the most magnificent library building in the 
world as the fit home of the work of the Ameri- 
can people for the literature of the world ; how 
in spite of the small hopes which other nations 



MODERN NOVELISTS. 

had of our worth in this direction, we have given 
them poets and historians and essayists they 
have been glad to learn to love and appreciate. 

What remains to be done no one knows. 
Some people think that as the country grows 
more rich and more busy our literary worth will 
go backward ; but let us hope and pray that it 
may not be so. The great and good men and 
women who put on paper for us the best thoughts 
and feelings which they have for the world, 
leave us the best gift which we could possibly 
have. To one who has learned to know what 
literature means, no matter how young or 
ignorant he is, a library is not a quiet room 
with rows upon rows of dusty, old-smelling 
books on the shelves ; it is a place where there 
are hundreds of good friends waiting to smile 
upon him, and to whisper good words in his 
ear; to tell him all the secrets which all the 
years of the past have stored up for him, and 
to let him feel their good-heartedness and teach 
him to grow like them. So our American lit- 
erature will grow good and great according as 
we grow good and great. 

And we all have a duty to it. Many of us 



MODERN NOVELISTS, 

would like to write books, and some of us will ; 
but to all alike comes the duty of reading them, 
and of reading only the best. Let us insist 
that those who write for us shall use good lan- 
guage, and shall have something worth saying 
to say to us. Let us at least wait until we 
have read all the good books which have been 
written before we turn to those which cannot 
help us. If we do this, when we are old and 
white-haired and spectacled we shall have such 
treasures of good reading stored up in our 
minds that we can never be sad or lonely, and 
(though it seems odd enough to think of it now) 
the young folks of those days will look at us 
with wide eyes, and long to be as wise and 
good as we. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




017 165 973 5 



